Content Marketing: The Four Cornerstones of Content Foundation

Marketing basics deliver greater value over the social web

Today another snippet from the talk I delivered in late June to business leaders in Philadelphia. The session was billed as a ‘marketing crash course in social media’, but one thing that I urged the crowd of nearly 100 professionals to consider was that the core fundamentals of marketing are even more important in this age of open and transparent bi-directional communication.

This is true because the essence of the social web is developed content that is made available to the targeted market in order to generate meaningful and useful conversations. These conversations serve a far greater purpose than simply trolling for the next sale. Effectively executed they actually build the ecosystem of the marketplace itself, bringing together buyers with those that contribute value to the problem that can be solved by corresponding products and services.

The four keys to ensuring that the content that drives such community development are as follows: disciplined messaging, buyer identification, story development and relationship building. All basic marketing fundamentals.

Getting back to basics is the only way to guarantee that the open conversations that define the social web are oriented towards helping your customers.

photo credit: Jukka Zitting